3 Tips for Cold Case Blogging that will give you unique content. I follow these three simple steps every time I decide to blog about an unsolved homicide.
Here they are:
1: I extent every case search to several search engines such as DuckDuckGo, Firefox, Yahoo, and Bing aside from Google. Search results differ and sometimes you can find locally lesser known newspaper articles, school newsletters, etc.
I scan those search results for small details, check the comments below the article, check whether anyone who commented added their website link, check that website, etc. It gives you the story from multiple angles.
2: Block time in your calendar and start reading! That was a resolution I made in the beginning of this year. It did not work for a long time but I am finally getting the hang of it. There are days in the week that are naturally more busy than others with weekly meetings, etc. Those days I use as Internet Search days.
I search by keyword, bookmark sites & articles, and place them all in a separate file on my computer. I do not try to read those bookmarked articles in chronological order. This is a “scanning the issue” file for a particular case. I draw my first mind-maps here as well. This works best for me to gain an interest and to want to dig further. If I spend a lot of time organizing the links by date I fear that I might lose interest.
3: After I read all the information that I have I make Google Alerts with specific keywords. You know now whether the case involves an unidentified person, an unsolved murder or, a missing person. Hopefully names appeared in the articles that you bookmarked as well as cities, states, dates, etc. Make a few Google alerts.
A Google alert is a very handy tool to keep up to date with news releases, new information that gets posted online related to the keywords, etc. It saves you a lot of time. The updates go straight to your inbox so you need not continuously search the Internet.
What are your cold case blogging tips?